The Hawk

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1917from The Wild Swans at Coole18 lines

“Call down the hawk from the air;Let him be hooded or cagedTill the yellow eye has grown mild,For larder and spit are bare,The old cook enraged,The scullion gone wild.”

“I will not be clapped in a hood,Nor a cage, nor alight upon wrist,Now I have learnt to be proudHovering over the woodIn the broken mistOr tumbling cloud.”

“What tumbling cloud did you cleave,Yellow-eyed hawk of the mind,Last evening? that I, who had satDumbfounded before a knave,Should give to my friendA pretence of wit.”

Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.

In brief

Summary

The poet's quick wit, a proud hawk, refuses to come when called.

The poem is a short exchange of voices. The first orders the hawk to be called down, hooded or caged until its fierce yellow eye grows mild, because the kitchen is empty and the household in disorder. The hawk refuses: it has learnt to be proud, hovering over the wood in broken mist and tumbling cloud. In the last stanza the poet speaks to the "Yellow-eyed hawk of the mind" and asks where it was last evening, when he sat dumbfounded before a knave and could only offer his friend "A pretence of wit". The hawk is his own quick intelligence, which will not come when it is needed.

Lines to remember

Call down the hawk from the air;

Yellow-eyed hawk of the mind,

A pretence of wit.

Line by line

Lines 1 to 6Call down the hawk
A practical voice wants the hawk brought in and tamed, "hooded or caged / Till the yellow eye has grown mild", because "larder and spit are bare". The comic household ("The old cook enraged, / The scullion gone wild") is the everyday world that needs feeding.
Lines 7 to 12The hawk refuses
The hawk answers in its own voice: it will not be hooded, caged or "alight upon wrist". It has "learnt to be proud", and its world is "the broken mist" and "tumbling cloud", free and unpredictable.
Lines 13 to 18Hawk of the mind
Now the hawk is named: "Yellow-eyed hawk of the mind". The poet asks what cloud it was cutting through last evening, when he sat "Dumbfounded before a knave". His wit came back too late, and he could give his friend only "A pretence of wit".

Themes

The wayward mind

The hawk is the quick, fierce part of the mind, the wit that strikes. It cannot be trained to serve: it will not "alight upon wrist". The last stanza shows the cost: faced with a knave, the poet was "Dumbfounded", because his intelligence was off "Hovering over the wood".

Pride and freedom

"Now I have learnt to be proud" is the hawk's whole case. It prefers "broken mist" and "tumbling cloud" to feeding the household. The poem half admires this pride, since a tamed hawk with a "mild" eye would be no hawk at all, and half regrets it.

Context

The poem was collected in The Wild Swans at Coole, published by the Cuala Press in 1917. Hawks were much in Yeats's mind in these years: his first play modelled on Japanese Noh drama, At the Hawk's Well, was performed privately in a London drawing room in April 1916. Here the hawk is turned inward, becoming an image of his own quick but unreliable wit.

Form

Three six-line stanzas in short lines of two or three beats, rhyming ABCABC, often with half-rhymes ("hood" and "proud", "sat" and "wit"). Each stanza is a separate speech in quotation marks. The clipped lines and hovering rhymes suit the darting, unpredictable bird.